IT as Profit Driver? Take a Ride With Private PaaS

General Motors’ announcement earlier last year that it would turn its IT operations into a home-grown muscle car has left many wondering if more companies will follow in the auto giant’s footsteps and use IT insourcing as a a way to gain competitive advantage. According to a Reuters report, GM had previously outsourced ninety percent of its IT services. The company now plans to hire thousands of software developers, database experts, and other IT staff. Randy Mott, GM’s new CIO, says IT insourcing will increase the company’s efficiency and productivity.

Insourcing versus outsourcing

IT outsourcing can deliver great benefits to an enterprise in terms of scale and convenience. However some companies have hit major roadblocks with this approach, with development cycles lagging, customer service declining, and market lead shrinking. The reliance on the public cloud as part of the overall outsourcing strategy can also jeopardize application stability and security. General Motors is betting that insourcing can change IT from a cost center to a profit driver. And shifting gears to a private cloud ensures the highest level of security and control…as long as it is done right.

IT insourcing introduces a whole new set of challenges. The same budget pressures that pushed companies like GM to move IT staff and infrastructure off-site in the first place still exist, and to achieve maximum results from insourcing, CIOs must pair skilled IT workers with the right cloud-enabling enterprise platform. A private Platform as a Service (PaaS) can help an enterprise gear up for a smooth transition to insourcing.

PaaS is a middleware platform layer that connects infrastructure to applications, and effectively cloud-enables enterprise workflow. A public PaaS is offered as part of commercial hosting service (like AWS or HP Cloud). A private PaaS is hosted internally (or offered as a dedicated hosting relationship on an otherwise public cloud infrastructure). Gartner Research breaks it out further. The software that an enterprise uses to run a private PaaS is a CEAP, or Cloud Enabling Application Platform. The PaaS is the service set up and maintained by IT—presumably serving internal customers exclusively.

Private PaaS: A race car that sips gas and makes money

When considering insourcing, IT must be prepared for the ride. Once viewed as a backseat-driving reactionary to business needs, IT now must not only drive, but set the strategic and visionary course. The next step is to carefully study the true cost of developing and delivering applications throughout the organization. Every aspect needs to be considered from concept to deployment, including coding, testing/development, integration, piloting, and feedback. What is likely to emerge from this initial analysis is that infrastructure and operations are expensive to run, especially when they get siloed or impacted by rogue projects.

The challenge for IT is to create an application development environment that is highly tuned for collaboration and resource sharing. But if IT management walks into the trap of building dedicated servers that sit idle for seventy percent or more of the time, it will fall right back into being a cost center.

Luckily, private PaaS solves these problems and makes insourcing a relaxing drive down a country road. It enables developers and IT teams to establish parameters for operating systems, programming languages, modules, frameworks, databases, and web servers. Private PaaS provides developers with a single, flexible, cloud-based environment to deploy new and legacy applications. In this environment, IT retains control over applications, data, security (privacy and compliance) and other critical factors. Companies need this kind of control when it comes to application development. Governance, standardization, and data protection all require the development cycle to be carefully monitored and managed. With its combination of flexibility and control, private PaaS makes that easy. With fixed constraints and one-size-fits-all approach, Public PaaS not so much.

Done in sixty seconds

A private PaaS sets the stage for a highly effective, productive, and collaborative development environment. Companies that have implemented a private PaaS find that it eliminates many of the constraints imposed by the outsourcing environment or by the internal platform scaling limitations. Developers push applications to the cloud easier, management better utilizes assets, and CIOs are not locked-in to vendor technologies. And ultimately, customers get new products faster.

A Fortune-100 tech company used to calendar cloud application deployment in twice-a-month cycles to accommodate downstream QA, staging, and production schedules. Miss a handoff, wait another two weeks. (It often took longer for a developer to learn an app didn’t work in production. Another week of recoding, wait for the next deployment window, and cross fingers.) Using a private PaaS that simulates the production environment in development, the company cut that entire deployment timeline down to a few minutes, allowing developers to roll out important code updates and feature sets on the fly. Deployment went from a hurry-up-and-wait approach to purely dynamic launch model, with the additional benefits of added visibility and control for IT. Getting to market faster with application improvements boosts the company’s competitive advantage.

The setup time to create a private PaaS is minimal. In fact, an IT lead can create an auto-configuring private PaaS atop private cloud infrastructure in only a matter of minutes. New and existing applications can then be migrated easily from current platforms to a private PaaS. And updates, upgrades, and performance all can be easily monitored from a central dashboard.

A well-constructed private PaaS supports high availability and automation without diminishing security. More applications can be deployed per piece of physical hardware compared to traditional virtualization.

Better capacity utilization…hooray! Wait, what about those extra servers?

And then there’s the profit driver piece: Some companies find that once they are up and running with their private PaaS they have headroom to tack on servers and resell capacity to partners, to internal orgs, even to external partners. And that can generate additional revenue, and put IT management in the rather-profitable position of making money from the services it provides.

More companies are rethinking outsourcing. Private PaaS makes the journey to private cloud (and even hybrid cloud) smoother, and ensures that IT is positioned as a thriving profit generator versus a rehashed cost center. Imagine that: an affordable, fuel-efficient, revenue-generating, shiny new muscle car…with IT at the wheel.